I apologize for my scarcity over the last week. I’ve got a bunch of personal things going on — I expect to be fairly scarce for the next week or so yet.
Thanks to Rayne, bmaz, and Ed for picking up the slack.
I’m having a particularly hard time with our nation’s celebration this year. It’s not just the things Trump is doing. It’s not just the many visible signs of where we’ve fallen short of the ideals our nation aspires to (though I double down on the idea that a Trump Effect, in which he makes things that have long been a problem visible, may serve us if and when we recover from his presidency).
This year, I’m wondering, myself, if I could have done anything more to serve the ideals of this country.
The same things that have kept me from writing saved me from watching yet another race-baiting speech from the President last night.
That said, I couldn’t help but observe, amid the coverage of his claim to be protecting the nation’s statues honoring dead racists rather than human beings facing a deadly disease, that there actually is a,
better place to celebrate America’s independence than beneath this magnificent, incredible majestic mountain and monument to the greatest Americans who have ever lived.
Sure, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln are key (and flawed) figures who have guided our country.
But the more obvious statue symbolizing our nation is the one sitting in New York harbor, the female figuring inviting your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free to be part of the great experiment that is our country, the one that welcomed so many immigrants who became key contributors to our nation.
It is that idea, the idea that any person, no matter how humble, can join this nation that has been so powerful an idea, when when he have fallen short from delivering on that dream.
And yet there was zero chance that Trump would have given a speech with that great female figure behind him, in the city he has fled (in part to hide his financial state). There’s no chance Trump would pay tribute to the abstract idea of freedom. There’s no chance Trump would risk a speech in a Blue State.
There’s sure as hell no chance that Trump would do anything to recognize how immigrants are the strength of this country.
Long before protestors started overturning statues honoring traitors to the United States, Trump overturned an ideal. He might well have held the Statue of Liberty underwater, shaking her violently as she drowned.
Donald Trump wants to run against those who’ve dared overturn those statues to traitors.
And yet he has betrayed the statue that better symbolizes what this country might be.